We tested our 3D print pen “escape room” at Beta Night and it went spectacular!
Justin Case: License to Print is a Story Room Experience to teach students how to use 3D print pens. Students build tools using 3D print pens to unlock a series of puzzle cases.
Justin Case was the name of our Story Room franchise, similar to James Bond. Our fabulous graphic design intern, Sloane, made these wonderful James Bond inspired posters for our experience.
In our experience, guests were newly trained agents sent in to recover the Venus de Milo’s...arms. See video starring the lovely Kate Le aka Agent 3Printio for an explanation.
We were able to have Brent Bushnell (CEO/co-founder of TBC), Mike Salyh (Game Designer @ 2BC/Co-Founder of Coin Crew Games), and Wyatt Bushnell (Co-Founder of Coin Crew Games) playtest our experience before we opened for the night. And we closed the night with CTO/co-founder Eric Gradman and corporate staff.
They really enjoyed our experience and were impressed by the originality of the puzzles. They said that they had done many escape rooms before, but the way that we engineered our experience was unique. Might have something to do with the lack of experience that I’ve had doing them? I’d done literally two escape rooms prior to working on this project, and one was designed by their team. Guess there are some benefits to not being that well versed in the field!
Something that I’ve felt very self conscious about since I joined the field of entertainment technology is my lack of familiarity with the field. I don’t play games and I didn’t grow up going to amusement parks. My parents didn’t believe in buying things, but rather investing in cultural experiences. I traveled a lot as a kid and went to many museums. That’s something that I still adhere to. I don’t keep games on my phone, I prefer to spend time talking with my friends over a nice home cooked meal, and I spend my money booking last minute flights around the world. So while I don’t always get all the pop culture game references, I still believe in creating experiences that bring people together and teach them something new.
In the first 20 minutes of the night we were booked! By the end of the first hour, we had a waitlist for our waitlist, which was pretty incredible. We were putting through about 5-6 people every 20 minutes (5 minutes for onboarding, 10 minutes for the experience, 5 minutes for debrief/reset). The experience had originally been meant for 4 guests, but it was so popular we had to put in more guests.
I spent the night onboarding guests as well as talking to industry folk about our experience. We had expected to be able to take turns running the experience, but it ended up taking all four of us interns working through the 4 hours to keep the experience going.
We had a slight hiccup after the third playtest when one of our puzzles broke. But luckily we had planned for this contingency. The puzzles were not fully dependent on each other and could be easily taken out of the experience if something were to break.
Being able to demo to the public among many other professionals in the field was amazing! Overall, people loved our experience. I overheard many guests at the bar telling each other that they had to go try it. According to our supervisor and the CEO, we were one of the most talked about experiences of the night (which, I’m still trying to figure out if they were trying to flatter us?).
Despite how jenky the whole puzzle set-up was, people loved the originality of being able to build their own tools to unlock puzzles. They enjoyed having agency in the experience (no pun intended). Some positive feedback from the debrief included:
Guests thought the experience was fun and clever
Guests enjoyed making tools with the 3D print pens
They liked our characters (Jacque DeLuxe aka Jacob Surovsky was tied up in the room and giving hints/monitoring the experience) and the storyline
Guests really enjoyed the badge puzzle (During the onboarding, guests practiced using 3D print pens to draw out their badges on a template. At the end of the experience, the last puzzle required that they use their badge.)
For negative feedback, most of the comments were out of our control. For example, the lighting in the room, the smallness of the space, and the parking situation. Guests actually wanted the experience to be longer and for it to be more challenging, which we can’t do because of thru-put in the classroom and our target demographic is much younger.
Brent Bushnell came by the next day to give us more feedback:
Loved making the hook and the use of the badges at the end
Liked the conductive wire puzzle
Learning escape room, maybe take 2 hours but you could be learning about circuits
Jokes in the video were good
Video was like maybe 20 seconds too long but that was
The red herring joke was a good one
Not generally a good thing but they helped to add reality
Good set pieces
Such limited info, you have to pour over everything
Number of things where he felt like he’d done it but didn’t get the feedback to feel like they’d done it
Circuit one
Spring load it or something
More direct feedback
“Did I solve it and it didn’t work or did I not solve it?” - More confirmation
Facescanner was amazing
Loves that you have to 3d print
Thought it was funny that it wasn’t an AI
During our team debrief, we actually had more criticism for our experience than guests did. There were many things that we had wished had gone a little smoother, and had been built a little sturdier. We had only a week and a half to finish up our experience, and some of the puzzles were not as well tested as we had wanted them to be.
In our post-mortem we discussed:
Simplifying the onboarding process
Fixing the circuit box puzzle to be less hackable + adding in a spring loaded mechanism
Making the boat puzzle box (that I created) easier for kids
Making the final puzzle more sturdy
Creating more opportunities for guests to build tools that require teamwork
Given that we only had two more weeks left of our internship, we spent this week documenting the work from this experience on Instructables and preparing it for handoff to future facilitators.
Overall, we were happy with how this experience turned out. Yes it could use a final professional polish, but what we ended up handing off was a strong proof of concept for further development.